Let's start with a disclaimer so I don't get a full e-mail box. This is a hypothetical discussion. I don't have a free ticket to give away.

Now then, if you had a ticket with a face value of "Gift", how would you select a person to give this to?

Obviously close friends, significant others and out-of-luck campmates would be high on the list, so let's exclude these. If everyone you know well enough to camp with already has a ticket or is not going this year, how would you make the selection?

What process would you use to even post the offer? Would you broadcast and then read through the (presumed) flood of pleas and possible bribe attempts? Would you stay down low, but then worry that you are missing out on the "right person"? What is your vision for how this would play out?

Secondary question: Assuming that any monetary exchange is at the face value of the ticket, is receiving an additional non-monetary offer for a ticket qualify as scalping, or is this a gift exchange? Does it matter if this is offered before of after the ticket purchase offer is accepted?

So, three things:What is your process for finding people?What is your criteria for selecting a person?Would you accept offers of non-monetary "gifts" for the ticket, or do you consider that scalping?

Last edited by portaplaya on Tue Aug 07, 2012 4:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

id make sure everyone has to jump through tons of hoops so i get as much attention on me as possible, as the window for jumping through the hoops would be open for a long time... .. it will make my 'gift' highly visible and my apparent awesomeness (by virtue of me giving this ticket away) would shine for a long while..

or.. id just pick some person on the list of 'WANTED' tickets and quietly contact them out of the public eye and gift them the ticket..

lemur wrote:id make sure everyone has to jump through tons of hoops so i get as much attention on me as possible, as the window for jumping through the hoops would be open for a long time... .. it will make my 'gift' highly visible and my apparent awesomeness (by virtue of me giving this ticket away) would shine for a long while..

or.. id just pick some person on the list of 'WANTED' tickets and quietly contact them out of the public eye and gift them the ticket..

Ah, a referential slam on someone you disapprove of. Certainly that is exactly what I was looking for.

So your true process would just be "random selection". That would be rewarding enough on the inside, eh?Do you have any soul inside that body?

Last edited by portaplaya on Tue Aug 07, 2012 4:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Basically boils down to "I'm too busy working. What awesome shit are you gonna do to make Burning Man a better place in my stead?" and NO FUCKING SOB STORIES. (Learned my lesson with 250 mostly-whiny emails in 2010.....).

This year's ticket went to a stellar individual who told me stories about a series of kind, interactive, fun and playa-synchronistic events he was involved in during the prior year. Good energy, as the hippies would say.

(And lemur-- yeah, I got a couple whiners saying I was making people "jump through hoops" but if you read my criteria, I'm not sure it's too much to ask to sit down and write a paragraph or two, in exchange for a ticket in a sold-out year. Some people love whining though! Waah, my free lunch isn't exactly what I wanted!

First, each person values different things, and that would be reflected in what they thought was the best way to pass the ticket along. Some people want tickets to go to the experienced, others, the novice, and so on. Each person has an idea about how passing on this ticket could effect the event and the receivers life. I didn't have a ticket and provided one person an essay, another a video, and others just plain amusement....and i was eventually offered gift tickets, not by all of these people, but by some. As for the second part of the question, like porn, each of us knows it when we see it, but that doesn't make us agree on what it is. Is mutual generosity a form of scalping? Not sure there are any answers, but plenty of justifications.

.....by the way, the folks who passed on gifting me a ticket, wrong, just plain wrong.....

Takes all kinds, dude. I had a very specific reason I was gifting that ticket-- for someone to do something I couldn't. It worked out great. Everyone's happy. And I get to shine in all my TOTALLY ANONYMOUS GLORY. My anonymous karma is sheeting down in golden waves of grain and oh god so much coffee can't stop

one doesnt need to have their name plastered all over to enjoy the attention of their 'anonymous donation'

An anonymous donor is giving the city $4 million to provide soccer fields for Almaden at Allen at Steinbeck School.

The announcement was made at the Aug. 1 Rules Committee Meeting. "I'll take $4 million any way someone wants to give it. I'd even take $3 million," said Mayor Chuck Reed, the chair of the committee that places measures on the city council's agenda. The issue is scheduled for council acceptance on the Aug. 7 agenda.

"This is the largest private donation the city has ever received," according to Nancy Pyle. She would not name the donor, who has asked to remain anonymous but said, "It is someone who cares deeply about improving the availability of soccer field space for the Almaden Valley."

I disagree. There's much less attention when it's anonymous. If I used my name, people would meet me and potentially say "oh, so-and-so! You're the one who gave away that ticket, I recognize your super-unique name which I've noticed other places!". This way, there's none of that. Any 'attention' I've been asking for was to simply boost the signal to get more entries into my ticket giveaway. Works great! I hope you can be in a position sometime to give away a ticket. It's fun, and making a person happy is nice.

lemur wrote:so instead of giving one person a ticket....away from the public eye.. as a gift..... bringing more attention to giving the ticket away involves a soul crushing defeat for dozens of people.. nice.

If your soul is crushed by not getting a free ticket in a ticket giveaway, you're doing something wrong with your life, and I'm not going to be responsible for that. Also: please don't buy lotto tickets, or if you do, please keep the suicide hotline nearby.

I wouldn't be above picking a person based on some kind of work contribution to a camp or project. Not making someone my personal butler or the camp's maid or anything, but stuff like design or building skills, labor wrangling abilities (for example if you're running a bar having a rockstar who can help manage the busy shift), culinary expertise, or even photographic skills (I'm not merely talking party pic photog, but someone who really has a wonderful eye and demonstrates that photography can be art)… hard to say exactly, I've never been in that position and I've never thought about it a whole lot.

Outside of something contribution-based, I'd look at it from the perspective of who I thought would benefit the most from the experience. You send some people to Burning Man and they have a great vacation and enjoy the party and back to their lives they go. You send others, and BAM… the dots connect (or maybe they disconnect). Their whole life changes for the better.

Me getting special recognition or something back in return wouldn't be a factor (again, for me it's hypothetical - I've never been in that situation), I think the gifting is its own reward. And I certainly wouldn't want that to become my identity.

Agreed, the whole "try outs" for tickets seemed a bit old. Would have been nice to see people looking for someone to compliment their vision. Photographer that needs a model, model that needs a photographer, etc. (Doesn't include creepy dude that needs to get laid).

Anyone who identified themselves as a dj would be out of the running. I do like the idea of picking a 'need a ticket' and just gifting it. So if I win the lottery or otherwise get out of my financial hole, AND win the ticket lottery, AND tickets are distributed in the same way after the first issue gets settled, I MIGHT have a ticket to gift. In some way I find satisfying.

I choose to give away the ticket I had to a survivor of the Cafe Racer shooting in Seattle.

Someone (not you guys) finally made a good suggestion for me to follow up on. "Person you know that has suffered a big loss lately" was a good one and I knew those involved in the shooting as friends of friends.